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NVIDIA 173.08 Linux Display Driver

04-11-2008, 12:00 PM

Phoronix: NVIDIA 173.08 Linux Display Driver

Last week it was exclusively reported by Phoronix that a new NVIDIA binary Linux display driver should be out in the next week, and sure enough we were right, again. The NVIDIA 173.08 Linux driver was released last night and features support for several new NVIDIA GPUs, including the GeForce 9800 series, experimental support for X Server 1.5, and a number of fixes with Linux 2.6.25 kernel compatibility.

Looking at the gotcha list that I'll run into when I update to Fedora 9 in a few weeks, I am now convinced this closed source driver is beyond lame. When the time is right, I will replace my 8600 GTS with an ATI card (most likely a 3870), there's no way I can keep on dealing with this madness.

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I'm still wating for my 8600gt to support the same TVout features my 6600gt did. The TVOverScan option does aboslutely nothing with my 8600gt, and the overscan is WAY off the edges.

mostly @ remm:
I bought an HD3650 to replace my 8600gt but fglrx 8.3 seems to love completely crashing my computer (I need to try it with 2gb/ram instead of 4, but taking out memory to use a video card is not high on my list of acceptable solutions). fglrx may not be a whole lot better than Nvidia's blob, depending on your setup. When I've been able to get it working 2d performance (dragging a window) is appallingly slow. I'm patiently waiting for radeonHD to progress a bit more, and fglrx 8.4.

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If you are happy about the Linux software and consideration Nvidia gives you, feel free to buy or continue buying

That's not my situation, I find Nvidia's driver to be buggy, unstable, and annoying to use, so hopefully you won't mind if I walk.

Buggy and unstable... I find that my personal experience is largely OPPOSITE of that right at the moment- but then I'm not trying to do SVGA out and a whole host of other things that are problematic all over the place. Now, having said this, I've found AMD's offerings to be quite a bit closer to that reality than I care to use them with. Things like not being able to play video playback without doing goofy things on a regular monitor aren't exactly bug-free and are much more screwed up than SVGA out, especially in this day and age of HDTV monitors being as cheap as regular TV's and whatnot...

Now, I don't like the fact that it's proprietary- but AMD's stuff still isn't there yet for most people and actually DOES seem to be buggy, unstable, and annoying to use. Until AMD gets it's act together or Intel delivers a decently performing device, NVidia's about the only game currently in town for most situations in 3D. If you don't like that, bug the crap out of AMD to get their drivers shored up or lend a hand or get someone else to do it on the FOSS drivers for their parts.

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Buggy and unstable... I find that my personal experience is largely OPPOSITE of that right at the moment- but then I'm not trying to do SVGA out and a whole host of other things that are problematic all over the place. Now, having said this, I've found AMD's offerings to be quite a bit closer to that reality than I care to use them with. Things like not being able to play video playback without doing goofy things on a regular monitor aren't exactly bug-free and are much more screwed up than SVGA out, especially in this day and age of HDTV monitors being as cheap as regular TV's and whatnot...

Now, I don't like the fact that it's proprietary- but AMD's stuff still isn't there yet for most people and actually DOES seem to be buggy, unstable, and annoying to use. Until AMD gets it's act together or Intel delivers a decently performing device, NVidia's about the only game currently in town for most situations in 3D. If you don't like that, bug the crap out of AMD to get their drivers shored up or lend a hand or get someone else to do it on the FOSS drivers for their parts.

Amen Brother. You've pretty much summed up the experiences I've had concerning the state of video drivers in linux.

that isnt exactly a fair thing to say.. while nvidias drivers may not be as fast under linux(i really dont know, i think they pretty much are), you arent doing a fair comparisin..
let me put it another way: